| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in
its way. For government is an expedient, by which men would
fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been
said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let
alone by it. Trade and commerce, if they were not made of
india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over obstacles
which legislators are continually putting in their way;
and if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of
their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would
deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievious
persons who put obstructions on the railroads.
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: each candle or lamp must have its share of oxygen likewise, and
that a very considerable one, and an average gas-burner--pray
attend to this, you who live in rooms lighted with gas--consumes
as much oxygen as several candles. All alike are making carbonic
acid. The carbonic acid of the fire happily escapes up the
chimney in the smoke: but the carbonic acid from the human beings
and the candles remains to poison the room, unless it be
ventilated.
Now, I think you may understand one of the simplest, and yet most
terrible, cases of want of ventilation--death by the fumes of
charcoal. A human being shut up in a room, of which every crack
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: much to occupy his mind as to show other farmers the excellence of the
new method by the evidence of facts. Being thus, in a hidden way, the
mistress of the estate, she had slowly and with a woman's persistency
rebuilt two of the farm-houses on the principle of those in Artois and
Flanders. It is easy to see her motive. She wished, after the
expiration of the leases on shares, to relet to intelligent and
capable persons for rental in money, and thus simplify the revenues of
Clochegourde. Fearing to die before her husband, she was anxious to
secure for him a regular income, and to her children a property which
no incapacity could jeopardize. At the present time the fruit-trees
planted during the last ten years were in full bearing; the hedges,
The Lily of the Valley |
